End of an Era

Yesterday was the last day of Bill Gates as a full time employee at Microsoft. Love him or hate him this man changed the world. Including your world. A true visionary he had that rebellious idea that the software costs money. Before that software was seen as something that comes with the hardware. That vision made him the richest man in the world. At the same time that another true genius called Richard Stallman came up with the idea that software should be free (as in speech), Gates wrote his infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists where he stated that software was a product and should be payed for in order to increase its quality and stimulate developers.

Bill Gates will continue to be chairman of the board in Microsoft and is still the largest single shareholder so you can bet that his word will still matter. His everyday job from now on will be his charity foundation - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

However there is one more important event. Windows XP will retire on Monday. From then on Microsoft will not sell Windows XP. This edition of Windows was the most successful of all and it took 5 years for Microsoft to release a successor which is the longest timespan between Windows releases.

Firefox 3 Download Day

Google Inc. decided to lead a P.R. campaign by trying to set a world record for the greatest number of downloads in 24 hours with their product Mozilla Firefox. The campaign started an hour ago and of course the website is down. The official Mozilla website also went offline for a while. I had the good intention to take part in setting the record :( Bad for me I guess. If you are looking for a new browser you can just download Internet Explorer 7 here (it works).

Update: As noted in the comments I am offering link to Opera. I truly believe this is the best web browser but as stated in the article The Broken Web I also believe that using anything but IE7 makes the web worse.

Update: Microsoft's IE team showed good manners and sent a cake to Mozilla. You can see it here. I wonder if Mozilla's devs will eat it and how long before they die after that.

The Controversial Vista

In the past year I am constantly involved in conversations about Windows Vista in chats, forums and live. Today I decided to share my wisdom with my multi-million reader base. In the last year I have argued on both sides of the "Vista Sux" debate. Why Vista is the best desktop OS but a failure at the same time?

The Broken Web

There is much buzz generated around the so called "web standards", web browsers and the general state of the Web lately. I decided that it is worth adding to the buzz, so that my multi-million reader base will have the opportunity to read my undoubtedly wise words on the subject...